Playlists

"It's the end of the world as we know it (and I feel fine)," sang Rem in 1987. Thirty-five years later, that sense of precariousness hasn't just returned - it's become far more unsettling. Back in the Eighties, nuclear apocalypse was thought of as a hypothetical worst-case outcome of the Cold War; today, that risk has been made dramatically real by the conflict in Ukraine, which sees an atomic power constantly threatening the use of nuclear warheads against its opponents - not just Kyiv, but the entire Western world. On top of that, the two years of the pandemic, with the alienating experience of lockdown and the heavy restrictions that followed, have only sharpened this dystopian "end of the world" scenario. Without wanting to make light of it, but also without giving in to cosmic day-after pessimism, we've put together this themed playlist, in which the nightmare of the "final solution" - nuclear or otherwise - echoes through different tones and shades.

We start, then, with the apocalyptic fairy tale in sixties beat sauce from Giganti ("La bomba atomica"), before sliding straight into the historic electropop radiations of Kraftwerk ("Radioactivity"), a mix of anxiety and chilling irony ("is in the air for you and me"). A double dose from Ultravox, who masterfully tackled the subject both with an exclamation mark (the romantic, Foxx-esque ode of "Hiroshima Mon Amour") and without one, with the last dance before the atomic blast of Midge Ure and his girl in "Dancing With Tears In My Eyes" (as seen in the cult video, where even the old home movies of a life once lived corrode away).

But for the entire new wave movement, nuclear apocalypse was a fixation, a constant obsession. Take, for instance, The Stranglers grappling with their "Nuclear Device" (from the epic "The Raven"), or Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark, who named their most famous hit after the Boeing B-29 - flown by Paul Tibbets and named after his mother - that dropped Little Boy on Hiroshima. Synth-pop running high on nuclear radiation also came from Heaven 17 (the ironic "Let's All Make A Bomb") and Anne Clarke (the seductive "Poem For A Nuclear Romance"), while U2 devoted an entire album to the "unforgettable fire" (specifically, to the photographic exhibition "The Unforgettable Fire" on the victims of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki), represented here by its poignant title track.

Those were the years of the Cold War, as they say. And so here is the anguish of an escalation expressed from two different points of view: while Sting, in "Russians", takes a passionate (and somewhat rhetorical) approach set to the music of Sergei Prokofiev, hoping that "the Russians love their children too" and spare them from "Oppenheimer's deadly toy", also name-checking Khrushchev and Reagan, the naive idealism of Adrian Borland of The Sound is sublimated in the moving crescendo of "Missiles", with keyboards mimicking the whine of warplanes and that desperate cry: "Who the hell makes these missiles?"

In the same decade, there would also be those who tried to tackle the subject by defusing it with humour. Like the glittering Donald Fagen of "The Nightfly", who in "New Frontier" imagines a party in a nuclear bunker, telling the story of an awkward teenager trying to woo a blonde bombshell and drag her into his unusual "den" ("It's just a dugout that my dad built, in case the Reds decide to push the button down... We've got provisions and lots of beer..."). Or the same R.E.M. of the aforementioned tongue-twister "It's The End Of The World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine)", a semi-serious chronicle of a world falling apart through an ironic pastiche of clichés, nonsense rhymes and surreal allusions (among the names thrown in at random, even Leonid Brezhnev alongside Leonard Bernstein and Lenny Bruce). More dramatic - though disguised behind a gorgeous melodic opening - is the piano ballad "Breathing", in which the crystalline soprano of Kate Bush reveals the outcome of a nuclear war, where all that remains is toxic, radioactive air: plutonium particles invading the lungs of a mother trying to protect the foetus growing inside her.

But the end of the world can be a matter of minutes. Four of them, as Roger Waters recalls in "Four-Minute Warning", named after the public alert system active in Britain between 1953 and 1992 to warn the population in the event of a Soviet nuclear attack (though in his story, it's the disabled young Billy who gives the launch signal to all the missile bases on the planet, which will destroy each other, freeing the world from military oppression). Two minutes (to midnight), on the other hand, separate the world from eternal darkness in the famous song by Iron Maiden, which alludes to the device devised by American scientists to calculate the risk of nuclear war on Earth ("Two Minutes To Midnight").

Italy too has produced its share of reflections on the subject. We've chosen three, besides the opening one by Giganti: the apocalyptic Area with "Brujo" ("sorcerer" in Spanish), which sets the stage for a nightmare of post-nuclear desolation on "Caution Radiation Area"; the striking prophecy of Franco Battiato in "L'esodo", complete with a premonition of Russian imperialism (“Prima che la terza Rivoluzione industriale/ provochi l’ultima grande esplosione nucleare/ prepariamoci per l’esodo/ il grande esodo/ un esodo/ per noi giovani del futuro/ Fine dell’imperialismo degli invasori russi/e del colonialismo inglese e americano…”); and finally the surreal "Washington", in which a sardonic Lucio Dalla, in an unprecedented electropop guise, tells the post-apocalyptic story of two pilots, the only survivors on Earth after a devastating world conflict (the first carries a photo of his children, while the second is nicknamed "zebra" because he's black but lost his arms and had them replaced with those of a white man named John!).

And while Cigarettes After Sex bend even their "Apocalypse" to their usual dreamy, narcotic cadences, A Perfect Circle, with "So Long, And Thanks For All The Fish", opt for a cinematic reference, evoking Garth Jennings' "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy", in which the dolphins, after warning humans that Earth is about to be demolished to make way for a hyperspace bypass, leave the planet with a laconic "So long, and thanks for all the fish" (the band's theory is rather peculiar, though: that the deaths between 2016 and 2017 of countless artists, including David Bowie, Prince, Gene Wilder, Muhammad Ali and Carrie Fisher, were a sign of an impending end of the world).

Chernobyl, of course, could not be left out - the mother of all nuclear catastrophes, evoked by the soundtrack to the HBO series of the same name, composed by Hildur Gudnadóttir, whose hiss in "Bridge Of Death" simulates the sound of radiation like the cry of despair of a helpless humanity.

Before the End, all that's left is flight, perhaps by makeshift means. But while Crosby, Stills & Nash, in the classic "Wooden Ships", imagine a band of survivors sailing away on a little wooden boat from a world devastated by the nuclear war between the two superpowers (the US and the USSR) fighting over Vietnam, Karl Wallinger's World Party, in "Ship Of Fools", turn the idea of the saving ship on its head, warning of impending catastrophe and crying out: "Save me, save me from tomorrow/ I don't want to sail with this ship of fools".

Happy listening, in the hope of exorcising - and never (again) seeing come true - the nightmares foretold in this playlist, which, in homage to Philip K. Dick, we decided to title "Songs For After the Bomb".

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31/12/2025